What happens when I publish my ad

Scripts with a large number of variants can take a while to publish - this article explains what is going on

The final stage of building an ad is Publishing - once a client has signed off a creative, we need to get the script ready to start serving ads.

There are two parts of publishing - generating a tag and rendering the viable versions of the personalised ad.

Generating a tag

The tag is a URL to the A Million Ads platform that, when requested, returns a personalised version of the ad (typically with a VAST response).

During publishing, it's important that the correct Platform (i.e. Publisher or DSP) has been selected for the script. This is to ensure that the VAST URL is constructed exactly as it needs to be for the Platform being used. 

Rendering the viable versions of the ad

The more resource-intensive part of the publishing process is that of:

• establishing the number of viable versions of the ad
• rendering each of the viable versions of the ad in the appropriate format

"Appropriate format" here can vary according to where the ad will serve - another reason why it is crucial to select the correct Platform when publishing.

Since there could be millions of different versions of an ad, it can take a couple of minutes to establish the number of viable versions and several hours to render them.